Guild Wars 2

I can understand why Engineers might find the Gyros underwhelming (although I’m fairly sure Bulwark Gyro will see a lot of play). Literally everything else about Scrapper is amazing, though, so the complaining is pretty silly.

babazhook.6805:

Oh you can be both. I play a mix of power conditon and hybrid on my thieves.

I assume you do that as a Traps build? As much as I like the idea of Hybrid, it doesn’t seem to really work otherwise…

Yes, we are in fact okay with it. It’s an interesting build and probably the only positive thing to come out of the June trait revamp for Thieves, but it’s nowhere near impossible to deal with. The Thief profession is also in a really rough spot right now, with people who don’t play it or know anything about it constantly coming into our subforum to complain about us being “overpowered” while also gloating and telling us we deserve to be underpowered (because apparently you can be weak and OP at the exact same time).

A better tack might be to ask how to best deal with the build, as it does have a lot of limitations. I assume you encountered it in WvW, because a central component of a Trap build is Trapper runes, and like several other rune sets they aren’t available in SPvP at all.

On that note, might I suggest playing SPvP instead of WvW if “balance” is what you truly seek? WvW isn’t meant to be as balanced and tightly regulated in the same way that SPvP is, so it would be a mistake to hold the two modes to the same standard.

Most of us have been patient for the better part of three years. The time for patience is over: HoT is now a month away and elite specializations revealed after ours are looking more thoroughly developed and significantly better overall (not to mention the years worth of still unaddressed design flaws with the Thief profession itself).

If anything, we need to be relentlessly vocal. It’s unfortunate, but it has been proven through similar situations in other MMOs that that the only way to get results as a marginalized class is to get extremely loud and make such a big stink that the developer can’t financially afford to keep ignoring it.

This doesn’t mean to get abusive, inflammatory, or mired in negativity, because there’s plenty of that to go around on this subforum already. It means standing together to hold ArenaNet accountable. Don’t accept vague, non-specific responses like “pistols are something we’re looking to improve”; demand concrete statements of intent and a tentative roadmap on how they plan to get the profession where it needs to be. Otherwise, we will continue to be ignored for another three years until the next expansion comes around and they want our money again…

I think people hated underwater combat more than Capricorn itself. Regardless, it should at LEAST be brought back for Custom Arenas, if not Unranked as well.

Nike.2631:

Thieves have survivability without stealth.

Yeah, no.

There’s been a bunch of good suggestions on how to make Revealed Training more relevant to the anti-stealth meta. My personal favorite is having it give you Protection for the duration of Revealed.

Zero Day.2594:

They just might be mis-directing their changes to other classes…

All jokes aside, they kind of are. Scrapper is loaded with traits that a Thief would kill for, such as the Toughness GM. You could transplant several skills from Scrapper Hammer straight to Thief Staff with no changes and it’d be a massive improvement.

And then there’s Revenant’s Shiro stance and the Devastation line, which as someone else mentioned are essentially lifted from GW1 Assassin. Seems it made more sense ANet to give that to the new profession than the one that’s literally GW2’s version of Assassin…

For what it’s worth, ronpierce is probably the only “non-thief” player in our forums making constructive and factual posts that I’ve seen any time recently.

PopeUrban.2578:

In GW1, when they designed assassin, they purposely did so without implementing stealth as a mechanic. Their reasoning? It was hell to balance. Assassins were still really good at being bursty hit and run characters with fun to play mechanics due to mobility and unique combo chains.

Assassins were awesomely designed, and what I thought I would be getting from Thief in GW2 originally. I would gladly sacrifice Shortbow #5 and every source of stealth if we could be a lot more like Assassins from GW1.

People keep saying that stealth “isn’t a Thief mechanic” because other professions have access to it, but there isn’t a single profession in the game besides Thief that relies on stealth just to be able to survive. For everyone else, it’s merely icing on the cake of all the other tools and options they have.

Focusing on evasion over stealth is ostensibly the right approach to be taking with a Thief elite specialization, but it will change very little if the massive design flaws afflicting Thief’s core skills and traits aren’t addressed.

Thief has gotten all of one official response in the last 3 months on anything not related to selling the expansion, and it was to say that Pistol is “something [they’re] looking to improve”. The language on that is so safely worded and vague—and the concern it’s addressing so far down the list of important, profession-breaking issues—that it makes me think they have little to no intention of addressing core Thief problems any time soon.

Guild Wars 2 > The Game > Professions > Thief

THIEF

Description TBD

Babylon.8972:

You cant have all =)

No, we can’t—and that’s fine. The real problem is how many other professions can. But I’m sure a Mesmer main such as yourself wouldn’t know anything about that, eh?

Babylon.8972:

You dont have sustain but you have stealth + regen with stealth+ condi remove with stealth and best mobility in the game with decent damage. You cant have all =)

Where, pray tell, does this regen come from? The healing skill no one can slot because Withdraw is mandatory (and that would only heal you for 540 total anyway)? Or maybe it’s the completely non-viable Shadow Arts trait that no one ever takes? Perhaps it comes from the trait in Acrobatics, well known as a worthwhile and competitive trait line?

Vital Shot and Body Shot are objectively terrible skills that need a complete redesign. Tweaking a number here or there won’t make them useful in their current form.

Going by the whiff I just caught of bad opinions and dangerously high levels of unwarranted self-importance, I take it another non-thief player has wandered into a thief thread to “set us straight” on how we’re actually OP and everything is fine?

I roll a rogue/thief in every MMO I play because I like to play “stealth” classes too, but at this point I’d rather have a functional visible class than an broken invisible one.

Understandable, as a lot of us need to vent right now. It’s not a fun time to be a Thief.

Rain.9213:

As I said, Scrapper hammer animations are recycled as well! So are Chronomancer’s, Tempest, and Herald Shield. In fact a lot of classes have recycled animations!

There are a variety of recycled animations in the elite specializations, yes. No profession has as many as Thief’s, but whatever… recycled animations are a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself (see above).

But hey, it’s clear you’re one of the few that actually enjoys Daredevil as it is. Not going to judge that, as everyone is entitled to their opinion and clearly someone is bound to like it.

The fact remains: a vast majority of Thief players are very disheartened about the state of Daredevil and the Thief profession at large, and ArenaNet would be wise to pay attention, lest they lose a small but profitable segment of their playerbase.

Traits that remove Reveal sound nice, but in the grand scheme of things they’re insignificant. The problem isn’t the rise of Reveal effects, it’s Thief’s absurd over-reliance on Stealth just to be able to survive. Until this is addressed, nothing of merit will change.

Rain.9213:

Hahaha what? The Daredevil doesn’t have unique effects, flavor, and animation?

If you were feeling charitable, you could consider Daredevil as technically meeting the barest possible definition of those words. After all, Daredevil has one (1) non-recycled animation, so that meets the requirements of “unique animation”, right?

All jokes aside, it is extremely likely that Daredevil will receive a lot more changes between now and the release of HoT… but not in the way that most people are hoping for.

The source of people’s frustration and disappointment with Daredevil is the blatant, visible lack of passion behind its development. While it’s easy to blame this on Karl, I think he was merely the one passed the hot potato that is designing and balancing the Thief profession. For whatever asinine reason, it seems to be a job that no one wants.

This is why people are frustrated. No amount of number adjustments and minimal mechanical changes can replace a desire to make the Daredevil fun. Until we have someone in our corner who is excited about playing the Thief profession itself—rather than going through the motions of fulfilling a bullet point on the back of the box—a majority of Thief players will continue to find the profession unsatisfying.

Unfortunately, I see a very low likelihood of this changing anytime in the near future. While I hate to say it, if things don’t come together for Thief in the first month or so of HoT then I’ll be finding another game to occupy my finite money and time.

Kageseigi.2150:

Be of good cheer, my friends! This will completely shift the balance of power in the Thief’s favor! :-D

And hence it will never happen, regardless of how interesting, cool, and even potentially balanced of an idea it is

The structure of a modern MMO with PvP and people’s expectations of what that should look like demand that rogue classes be held in check. For reasons beyond my comprehension, the rogue archetype generally doesn’t appeal to general audiences in the same way that other archetypes like warrior, ranger, and mage do.

This results in rogue classes continually getting the short end of the stick in MMOs in two dangerously interdependent ways:

1> It is hard to find developers passionate about developing rogue classes, due to statistically lower appeal mentioned above.
2> People fear and hate what they don’t understand… especially when it’s popping out of stealth to do burst damage to them.

It’s not fair, but that seems to be the way of the MMO world. I guess we’ll have to start our own if we want to play a satisfying and well designed rogue class. Shame they’re so expensive to get off the ground…

BIRDPUNCHER.8263:

Is it reasonable to suggest that the Revealed-applying skills be changed to, instead of applying Revealed, simply removing stealth from affected players?

I would like to strongly echo this. The toolbelt skill on the Scrapper Elite removing players from Stealth instead of causing Revealed seems like a great direction to go with other anti-Stealth abilities. You could still leave in self-applied Reveal to stop people from chaining Stealth.

I’d also like to suggest the idea of profession-specific durations for self-applied Reveal. The Thief has been sold as the “master” of Stealth to the point where they’re balanced around using it to survive, so four seconds of Reveal hurts Thief disproportionately more than any other profession. Either way you cut it, Thief badly needs more reliable Stealth OR less reliance on it through an increase in core durability. Preferably the latter

Sir Vincent III.1286:

You can twist and turn my post all you want, but your post does nothing really.

If factual data and reasoned argument “twist” your post beyond recognition then that’s on you, not me.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Amante.8109:

Let’s not forget that the Berserker is also getting a stun break similar to Bandit’s Defense, and yet it’s staying at 10s CD…

Can it block an attack? Can it knock down?

No, but it doesn’t need to. New skills for a profession are generally designed to shore up weaknesses or support underutilized profession mechanics. Will Outrage see a lot of play? Probably not, but that’s only because Warrior already has insane durability and some of the best stun breaks in the game.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

A skill similar to this is Counterattack (Ranger GS) and it costs them 15s without the stun break.

So compare to that, BD is not something you should complain about.

When discussing utilities that stun break, how is a weapon skill that does not stun break relevant? Is the idea that I should feel a short block and knockdown with major downsides come at such a premium that I shouldn’t question any potential changes to Bandit’s Defense during a period of developers soliciting our feedback? That seems a tad unreasonable if so.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

With all that in mind, Bandit’s Defense could use a few tweaks if they’re wedded to the 15s CD. Personally, I would make the block a rollover skill rather than automatic and extend the duration to 2s. Ideally, it would continue blocking during the kick as well.

You use a weak skill to compare with BD and think that it is justified to make BD an OP skill. Good luck with that one. In other words, I disagree with you.

There are plenty of Blocks in the game that last longer than a second or block more than one attack. As things stand now, the Block and Knockdown portions of Bandit’s Defense have so many limitations that they’re of questionable usefulness:

-Block lasts for one second
-Block only blocks a single attack, in a game drowning in multihit spam
-Knockdown only happens if triggering attack is melee range
-Knockdown happens automatically (have fun hitting pets/phantasms)

Why, exactly, would it be “overpowered” to leave the skill with its current functionality on a 10s cooldown, or improved functionality on a 15s cooldown?

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Exactly. It’s a 15s stun break or 12s stun break when traited with Brawler’s Tenacity.

I don’t believe that there’s another 15s (12s) stun break out there.

Even pre-HoT, there are three 15 second or lower stun breaks, with an additional 11 that are 30 seconds or below. Again, this is without even accounting for traits that reduce or refresh cooldowns.

So yeah, I guess I’m not really seeing why it’s a big deal to give the weakest profession in the game a useful stun break that potentially rivals their single viable current choice. Sometimes I think people are so used to being marginalized that they’re afraid of Thief actually becoming good…

The best ideas I’ve heard for what could potentially replace Stealth as a core Thief mechanic are all related to weapon swapping. My personal favorite idea is the Thief having a way to switch hands when dual wielding—D/P becomes P/D for example. There would be some problems to solve like how two handed (or two of the same) weapons work with this, but it’d be interesting.

A simpler weapon swap mechanic that’s been suggested is Thief having no cooldown on swapping weapons normally. As the vast majority of weapon swap sigils and talents ALREADY have an ICD (and you could tweak the ones that don’t), it would be a reasonably balanced mechanic, I think.

People are unsatisfied with Daredevil’s special mechanic because it’s a recycled version of a trait we had from the release of the game to three months ago… and was overtly nerfed so that they could make it into the future Daredevil focus. The missing GM traits are just sprinkles on the the kitten sundae.

I think we need increased durability more than anything, as we are the squishiest profession in the game by a mile. Our damage is falling behind too, but the bigger problem is surviving the modern meta’s meat grinder long enough to even do any. The lack of durability also greatly limits the variety of builds Thief can bring to the table.

Slowmelt.8547:

If RNG is bad, why is Improvisation a thing?
I’ve never even heard of anyone using it, on any build, because it’s too unpredictable to be useful.

I like it a lot, personally. It’s more of a placement issue as mentioned above—are you really going to pass up on Executioner for Improvisation? Probably not. It also doesn’t help that we have such a rigid, unchanging set of utilities that must to go on our bar right now. If we had more options, there would be more viable Improv fodder.

In terms of how the developers view it, I think they see it as a different kind of RNG (and it is). Their rationale on Ricochet was that some people just wanted it for the range increase and found the cleave’s randomness detrimental to their playstyle. An overestimated problem perhaps, but that was their reasoning, and it’s obviously a different kind of case than Improvisation is.

Gray.9041:

the problem is, a few professions have stealth – mesmer, engi (moreso with scrapper) – but only thieves are balanced around stealth.

Indeed. I know a lot of people are fearful of stealth being weakened, as we have to rely on its as a crutch right now, but I would gladly lose our focus on stealth if it meant increased core durability and damage avoidance in other areas.

As uninspiring as Daredevil’s “elite mechanic” is—and as much work as the spec still needs—I think focusing on evasion over stealth was a step in the right design direction.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Most stun breaker are on 60s coold down. I wouldn’t complain or bring too much attention to this skill else it will get nerfed hard.

Pre-HoT, there are 52 forms of stun break in the game. Of those 52, 22 have 60s CDs or higher. That does not qualify as “most” (it’s not even half), and it’s also not accounting for traits that reduce or reset skill cooldowns. Let’s not forget that the Berserker is also getting a stun break similar to Bandit’s Defense, and yet it’s staying at 10s CD…

With all that in mind, Bandit’s Defense could use a few tweaks if they’re wedded to the 15s CD. Personally, I would make the block a rollover skill rather than automatic and extend the duration to 2s. Ideally, it would continue blocking during the kick as well.

HaxTester.9816:

Maybe increase the trait space, for example make minor traits selectable, so other traits can make a comeback, while others that have been baselined will now become optional (to reduce imbalance).

The amount of individual choices offered by the new Trait system is fine. The real problem is how many of the choices are poor ones, whether it’s due to iffy placement in the line or simply a badly designed trait.

As Thief, I never feel like I’m picking fun traits or discovering new builds anymore… nearly every trait choice comes down to one of two things: take the mandatory trait to not die (hi Shadow’s Embrace and Bountiful Theft), or all three choices are awful and you’re trying to find the least awful of them. Not a fun experience.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

If you don’t trait fro Revealed Training, you get nothing when revealed.
If you trait for Revealed Training, you get +200 power.

The players who choose to reveal you have to deal with the powerful you. It is a counterplay.

However, not a lot of players spec for Revealed Training since they rather pick Panic Strike, thus they are purposely not wanting to counter Revealed. That’s their own fault.

200 Power is nice, but it doesn’t make you a beast all of a sudden. You might hit a bit harder, but you’re still squishy as hell and now unable to Stealth. If Revealed Training gave Protection or something along those lines, that’d be a start. As it is, it’s just too hard to justify most of the time.

And no, gaining 200 power is not “counterplay”. Counterplay would be having a way to avoid or disable their ability to Reveal (i.e., what Reveal literally is in relation to Stealth).

blarghhrrkblah.3412:

Just a suggestion for Unhindered Combatant…from what I have seen, the current animation for Dash is a short version of Rush. Might I suggest that, if absolutely no new animations can be made, the animation for Burning Speed or Shield Bash be used instead? Both of these animations retain the characters weapons (I read that the thief’s weapons would disappear when using Dash), and in my opinion, would feel more like a quick dash than Rush does.

I’ve heard two great suggestions on a proper animation for Dash. One is what you mention, the other would be it having little animation at all and being a fairly quick shadowstep instead. Due to the potential for deception, a blinking dodge would have to be carefully balanced, but you could tweak particulars like the distance of the dash and the duration of its boons to compensate.

Either way, really, as the current animation for Dash does not work at all.

Bllade.1029:

Amante has the right idea but the problem with his/her suggestion is that it kind of forces the player to use that strategy. After every Debilitating Arc everyone would use Weakening Charge if they got that reduced initiative cost. Doesn’t really promote different strategies and tactics.

Good point. It’s an inelegant situation to be sure, but I’m not thinking of any better ones at the moment short of completely redesigning it. Sadly, Debilitating Arc and Dust Strike don’t flow or synergize with the rest of the Staff skills at all.

Sir Vincent III.1286:

When I use Withdraw, I close the gap with Steal or Scorpion Wire. You can very well do the same here.

As Thief, you should not have to blow something as important as Steal just to compensate for one of your own abilities taking you out of melee range as a melee spec. That is simply bad weapon design.

As for Scorpion Wire, it’s a fun skill but in no way relevant to the discussion we’re having. It’s far too buggy and situational to ever be worth slotting in PvP.

I had a couple thoughts on Staff I’d like to share.

People are generally of the opinion right now that Debilitating Arc is of limited usefulness, as the evade back takes you out of melee range. This forces you to spend even more Initiative on Vault or Weakening Charge to get back in after evading if you want to keep doing damage at all. Lest ArenaNet forget, Initiative is a precious resource that Thief never really has enough of.

My suggestion would be to add an effect to Debilitating Arc along these lines: “Your next Weakening Charge within X seconds costs no initiative.”

That would definitely be the best solution, but I have a feeling they don’t want to try and finagle the tech required for it. :/ Are there any preexisting skills that work on a charge system like that they could crib from?

Revealed has not aged well as a mechanic. It was implemented and buffed in a really heavy-handed way in response to the constant “nerf thief!” cries of 2013. It should be obvious in 2015 that we’re not currently a meaningful threat to anyone, so now would be a good time to tone down Revealed and make it more consistent (or better yet remove it entirely).

I think the toolbelt skill on the Scrapper elite is the right direction to go. It appears to take people out of Stealth WITHOUT causing Revealed, which would be a better way to handle Stealth and anti-Stealth abilities in general.

Cyrus.4105:

I appreciate that you’re trying to consider balance in every move you make by introducing ‘if’ and ‘ors’, making us choose what we want to give up in order to gain x y and z thing, but nearly every other class out there (and especially the elite specs) operate on ‘and’.

This perfectly summarizes what it feels like to play Thief.

I know that in theory, we’re not supposed to “compare” classes, even though class design is a collaborative team effort (and never mind that classes are literally competing with each other in game, so comparisons between them are actually incredibly relevant).

Still, it’s hard not to feel like Thief is continually being handled with kid gloves when you see a reveal like the Scrapper. Loads of durability, traits that convert durability into damage (why don’t we have these again?), an arguably better version of Shadow Refuge…

Here’s a few Scrapper traits that, if anything, highlight things that Thief is sorely missing:

Impact Savant (Minor): The duration of your outgoing stuns is increased and the duration of stuns applied to you is decreased.
Recovery Matrix: Using a healing skill temporarily reduces damage you receive.
Rapid Regeneration: Rapidly recover health while affected by swiftness or super speed.
Mass Momentum: Gain Power based upon your Toughness. While you are affected by stability, gain stacking might.
Perfectly Weighted: Hammer skills deal increased damage. Evading an attack grants stability.
Expert Examination: Stunning or dazing a foe applies vulnerability and weakness to them.
Adaptive Armor: Gain stacking toughness when struck. Reduce incoming damage from conditions.

That last one is a Grandmaster trait, unsurprisingly. I wonder what sort of Grandmaster traits Daredevil could have potentially had…

Karl McLain.5604:

I believe this was fixed in the July 28th release. It’s possible that they could behave the exact same as mantras. At this time, we’re going with the theme that Distracting Daggers are something you can hold over your opponents for a period of time, and then it’s gone. We’d rather encourage using the daggers and getting those interrupts off, than simply holding the daggers for hours at a time.
Please feel free to let us know how they play during the next beta event. There’s quite a few ways to go with the ability and I’m not sure they have to behave exactly like mantras.

My mistake on the Mantra cooldown thing, sorry! I should probably stop thinking of Distracting Daggers as a Mantra and focus more on its unique properties anyway

On that note, I forgot to mention one other major issue greatly hindering the intended effectiveness of Distracting Daggers: the 1s~ ICD between individual uses. Between the ICD and the travel time, it’s functionally impossible to interrupt people who have Stability or even a Block up, as by the time the Daggers are off ICD from their first use, the ability you were trying to interrupt has already been safely completed. This is especially frustrating with things like Guardian’s Shelter.

My recommendation would be to either remove the ICD, or keep it and make the thrown daggers unblockable. Regardless, it would be great to hear your rationale on why you feel an ICD is necessary, given the reasons above.

That’s a really good point too. Ye GODS, is Vital Shot slow. Which makes it even easier for people to predict when it’s going to fire and either dodge or get out of its paltry 900 range (why isn’t Pistol range 1050 baseline again?)

Driften.8716:

I will agree with others and say this needs to be treated like a mantra but I will not pass judgment on the changes until I see them in the next beta. I like the increase to velocity as I felt the daggers never hit during a cast to actually interrupt unless you were able to predict the cast. Can we make sure this is working in PVE as well plz? Also hope the interrupt CD is fixed otherwise the skill is pointless. 25 seconds is a decent window. I don’t mind arming the skill if the arm is not going to make me loose my window to hit.

The best potential version of the skill is one many other people suggested, which is having Distracting Daggers be a permanently equipped charge-based skill (with charges refreshing somewhere around every 8-10 seconds). This would further differentiate it from being a pseudo-Mantra and give it some unique Thief flavor. Sadly, I don’t know if they have the tech for something like that yet.

Right now, Distracting Daggers is a mediocre version of a Mantra with a bunch of drawbacks Mantras don’t actually have, and it won’t be on any PvP Thief’s skill-bar. Let’s not forget that Mantras, once pre-casted, immediately start cooling down for future use AND you have the charges you just prepared ready to use with no time limit. With that in mind, I strongly suggest you consider one of the following changes:

1> After Distracting Daggers are equipped, there is no time limit to use them
2> The time limit stays, but the CD starts refreshing after they’re equipped

That’s kind of the problem… how do you support Vital Shot for both Power and Condition builds, when it’s currently terrible for both?

My vote is to up its physical damage and… mostly leave the Bleed intact actually, because Vital Shot has a pretty sad rate of Bleed application even WITH Superior Sigil of Earth slotted (which no one ever does anyway).

One obvious direction to go for supporting mainhand Pistol condition builds would be to give Thief a bleed on hit/crit trait like what Warrior and Engineer have in their trait lines. This would shift more of the Condition focus to traits rather than core weapon skills, which is probably the right direction for weapon design to go in general.

Pistol #1 and #2 need a redesign something fierce. They’re both hot garbage, and a lot of what is holding P/P—and Pistol specs in general—back.

The amount of blind faith people place in ArenaNet in threads like this is absurd.
New professions and elite specializations require a lot of time and iteration to pull off properly, things that Daredevil, Scrapper, and Druid won’t be getting much of before release. This is a meaningful concern, because in the games industry, many things that are released broken stay some degree of broken forever.

Yes, ArenaNet has said that they will continue to adjust elite specializations after release if necessary, and I think they believe it when they say it… but beliefs often don’t survive contact with reality, especially a reality as harsh and unforgiving as the MMO business.

Venture capitalists invest millions of dollars in getting fledgling MMOs off the ground, and they want to see a return on that investment ASAP. As a result, MMOs are frequently rushed out early, and MMO expansions are rushed out early almost without exception. Companies like Blizzard are often half-way into developing the next expansion before even releasing the “latest” one. The constant pressure from both players and investors to keep pushing things forward with new content means that under-performing classes tend to pay the greatest price through the lack of developer attention they receive.

Looking back at the first three years of GW2 supports this. If you’re been playing a profession like Thief or Ranger for the last few years and seen countless crippling bugs and core profession issues go completely unaddressed, why should you assume things will be any different in HoT? What has changed between then and now? Where are they going to find the time to address these issues that they seemingly couldn’t before?

Traditionally, people haven’t run Condi builds in PvE because a lot of the earlier content is rife with mobs that die too quick and structures that are immune to conditions.

The newer areas like Silverwastes seem designed with Conditions more in mind. Sinister/Rampager P/D is actually quite good there, and with Verdant Brink and other HoT zones mirroring the design principles of Silverwastes, P/D should continue to get better in PvE. Impaling Lotus and Impairing Daggers add a lot to the spec as well

Cynz.9437:

I am just wondering one thing: if i put slow on revenant, would his relentless assault (?) grant him longer evade frame? Also, i see big problem with it because atm i can double dodge/withdraw through sowrd 3 and maybe stay alive, if the spell is slower however i would need like 5 dodges to avoid absurdly high dmg from that spell. Frankly i don’t see how this specific stolen spell is actually useful vs revenant in particular.

That’s a good point, as I’m pretty sure Slow does increase Evade frames.

They’ve already said in this very thread what the reasoning was. As much as people hated the “Purity of Pistols” answer before, I think it was a clumsy attempt to say the same basic thing: RNG cleave procs are not a great design, and it was something they decided not to carry forward when revamping the trait system. Simple enough.

The bigger issue remains not that Ricochet was removed, but that nothing was put in its place. Hopefully that is rectified very soon.

So, I noticed something in the preview for the Engineer elite specialization:

“The Purge gyro will zip around with you cleansing yours and your allies’ conditions every so often. The team designed this one as means to give the Engineer some much needed defense against conditions.”

Why is condition cleansing “much needed” for the Engineer but “situational” for the Thief? Thief has the worst condition cleansing and overall core durability in the game.

Escapist’s Absolution is already being vastly overestimated by players and developers alike. On average, a Thief is not going to be evading once per second or even once every few seconds. In real PvP, successful dodges often don’t even count as evades due to evading past the hitbox of an attack. Please, please, PLEASE reconsider adding Escapist’s Absolution to the Driven Fortitude minor. We need it to survive.

People are gradually realizing that Reaper is going to be a nightmare for Thief in HoT.

Xovian.8572:

People seem to forget their mobility too.
But it’s okay cause they aren’t thieves.

While Mesmer has good burst mobility, they can’t be as mobile in a sustained manner as a Thief can by a long shot. The problem is how thoroughly Mesmer encroaches on Thief in general… Mesmer and Thief already have a similar design space of “agility and deception” but Mesmer seems to do 95% of it better right now.

But the best mobility we still have… otherwise Thief wouldn’t be represented in high level SPvP at all. Just sucks we have nothing to DO with that mobility other than backcap or run away.